“That’s a… Beautiful sentiment,” Lescott cringed. He didn’t know what else to say, so he asked the question that every man asks when they’ve run out of ideas, “How’s business?”
“I can’t complain. A group of tourists broke into the panda bear enclosure at the Zoo last week, so the operators had no choice but to purchase my platinum package.”
“Pandas?” Lescott laughed, mistaking her words for a joke. They were anything but, and when she didn’t join in with the laugh, he straightened his face at once. “Pandas?”
“Kept the whole crew tied up most of the week. Evisceration will do that.” Lydia shook her head.
Lescott looked for Harris, but all he saw was the gentle swinging of the kitchen door. “Pandas?”
“Are you simple?” Lydia asked with a hearty chuckle.
Lescott exhaled deeply and downed his whisky. “Do you not need to… You know… Go back there and do whatever it is you do?” Lescott offered the macabre woman a convenient exit from the conversation.
Lydia smiled; she was enjoying Lescott’s reluctant company. “Best we wait until the big fella is done.”
Lescott turned his attention to the black and white television playing behind the bar. There, in ultra-low definition, Elsa Markle sang along to a slow and mournful arrangement of The Shirelles’ hit “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?” Her elegant hips swayed as she slid up against the microphone stand seductively. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation had been advertising the show for weeks as the television event of the century. Lescott was left unimpressed, the woman on screen had taken her bad girl reputation too far. Lescott knew a heroin addict the moment he laid eyes upon them.
As the manager of the Carousel Club walked into the kitchen with paper bags full of groceries in his arms, he grumbled to himself. As he began to empty their contents onto the kitchen bench, it was clear that his displeasure had become action, and he’d mistreated the damn breakfast foods. The bag, and everything inside it, was dripping with raw egg. “This can’t be hygienic.”
It wasn’t salmonella the man was concerned about. Had you been standing there in that kitchen at that moment, you’d have run your eyes across the bench, past the grumbling breakfast cook, over the explosion of eggs, and your eyes would have come to rest on the dead body that lay on the bench not six inches away. The bloated corpse of the late Walter McCoppin. Walter had escaped from Pentridge Prison in Victoria, where he had been on remand for numerous charges of rape, just days earlier. Simply put, he was a bad man. He’d crossed state borders in the back of a lorry, and had intended to make a new go of things in Adelaide, far away from the long reaching arm of VICPOL.
His plan had gone awry after he’d hit the town to celebrate. After treating himself to a fine piece of rump at a fancy steakhouse, he indulged in several colourful cocktails that no self-respecting man would have been seen drinking in public. Then, in a drunken state, with a belly full of beef, he had decided to sample local produce of an altogether different variety. He came across Jane, a streetwalking mother of three, in a secluded and poorly lit spot on the banks of the Torrens. They negotiated, he haggled, and eventually she agreed to an arrangement that worked for her. It could have been a barely adequate end to a productive night for both parties, but Walter reverted to type. Maybe he realised he’d run out of cash, maybe it was all just feeling a little too consensual for him to achieve the vile climax his twisted fetish demanded. Either way, he backed out of the deal and he forced himself upon Jane. Rather, he tried to. That’s where he died. The only penetration that occurred there in that quiet spot on the Torrens, was the heel of Jane’s shoe going through Walter’s neck. As it turned out, Jane kicked up a cut of her profits to the organisation run by none other than Ronnie Prince. Before she went home and made her children supper, she called in a favour. And that’s how poor old Walter McCoppin ended up on the kitchen top of Adelaide’s premier burlesque venue, the Carousel Club.
Harris clicked to get the venue manager’s attention. “Do me a favour will you…? Put his dick back in his trousers. I can’t concentrate with it staring at me like that.”
Back at the bar, Lescott was still searching to find some sort of middle ground with Lydia Ramsey. Her peculiar take on life and death was turning his stomach. “Traffic accidents are steady, and they’re getting steadier with the increase of cars on the road, but people don’t seem to be killing each other like they used to.”
“No?”
“No. It’s a real shame… I think people had more than a gutful of killing in the 40’s. Everyone came home sick of it. A series of gangland murders… A throwback to the razor wars of the 20’s… That’s what I need if I’m going to retire early. I own a beautiful beachfront property in Robe, a lovely little seaside town south of here. Would you like to see a picture?”
Harris hadn’t moved. He was standing over Walter McCoppin looking at the pain in his eyes. That man had been there one moment. Then gone the next. He might have had plans for the next day, or the day after. He’d never get around to them. A stranger named Jane had simply switched the lights off. It’s an unsettling thought, how close we are to death at all times. “It’s amazing,” Harris said. “We fill our lives worrying about anything and everything. All of it meaningless in the face of what’s coming. But it distracts us from what is as imminent as it is unavoidable. Before we can get over all the triviality we dedicate ourselves to, we’re dead. If we could get past the ridiculous pursuit of currency, clothes, cars, haircuts, holidays and houses, maybe we’d ask the right questions. Maybe we’d fix what’s broken in man and stop the savagery that we throw into the world. That life throws our way. And that’s why nothing changes. Nothing gets better. Hurry begets ignorance begets selfishness begets misery. Generation after generation. An ever-turning wheel. The Rota Fortunae.”
The bar manager, standing a couple of feet away, wasn’t listening. He was too busy making a meal of breakfast. He’d clearly never cooked eggs before. He splatted the eggs in the pan and just began frying them, shell and all. “How do you like your eggs?”
“Not like that.” Harris opened a cupboard below the worktop and pulled out a couple of tins of pineapple, he pulled the lid off and poured their contents in a nearby sink. Now he had his receptacles, it was time to fill them. He used a long index finger to prise open the dead man’s mouth. Harris was thankful that rigor mortis had not yet set in. A pair of pliers were preferable to the crowbar and hammer he’d turned to out of necessity several times in the past. He placed the pliers inside the dead man’s mouth and began to remove teeth, one by one.
“Toast and vegemite to keep you going?”
“Keep that foul-tasting shit away from me. What do you think I am? An animal?” Harris answered.
Lescott was drowning his discomfort at the bar. As Lydia enthusiastically chattered away about the ins and outs of the crime scene cleaning business, on the television, a clown walked onto the soundstage. To Lescott’s disbelief, the clown started boxing a kangaroo. Not a man in a kangaroo suit, an actual kangaroo. All for the pleasure of a studio audience. This was a different time. The clown did his best Muhammad Ali impression for a moment or two by dancing around, avoiding getting too close. The kangaroo, which had been forced into a pair of boxing gloves, had the clown’s number. It leaned back upon its tail and kicked at the man’s chest with its powerful hind legs. It kicked with such ferocity that the clown flew backwards out of camera shot. The studio audience roared with laughter; it was loud but it didn’t drown Lydia Ramsey’s ramblings out. A packed-out Melbourne Cricket Ground holding 100,000 drunk Australians couldn’t drown Lydia Ramsey out.
Lescott remembered a snippet of an old conversation he’d heard decades ago. “My old man… He was a copper down in Melbourne. Remember him telling me about this crime scene cleaner down there. Business was bad so he started, you know… Creating business opportunities for himself. He’d kill people and make it look like accidents or suicide. He used to wait in a pub aroun
d the corner until the call came through. One day he drank far too much and forgot to wait for the call. He walked straight back into the scene with a mop and a bucket, and he gave the game away. He ended up hanging for eight or nine counts of murder. Hear about that one?”
“Hear about it? That’s me Uncle Reggie. My old fella’s brother,” Lydia excitedly declared.
“Small world.”
“Speaking of family… My daughter’s about your age,” Lydia twinkled. “She cooks, she cleans. And if she’s anything like her old mum, she’s a hell of a root.” Lydia must have spotted the disgust that Lescott tried to hide behind a weak smile, because she added, “There’s worse families to marry into, you tinker.”
When Harris was done with McCoppin’s teeth, he turned his attention to his fingers. He looked through the kit that had been hurriedly put together for him in his absence, but he couldn’t find what it was he was looking for.
Down the bench, the club’s manager slammed a joint of bacon down and began trying to carve it with what looked like a paring knife. The rashers of bacon were uneven in length and thickness. If there was one thing Harris hated, it was seeing good bacon go to waste. “What the fuck are you doing?”
“I’m butchering the bacon.”
“I can see that.” Harris wiped his hands on the man’s apron and took control of the situation by casting the paring knife to one side. He trimmed the badly-hacked bacon with precision, and then turned his attention to the joint. Within seconds he had carved two dozen near identical rashers, ready for the pan.
The club’s manager looked impressed. “Are you a butcher or something?”
“Depends which newspaper you read.” Harris looked up with a wry smile, but the man didn’t understand the joke. He was quite unaware of Harris’ reputation. Harris looked down at the knife he had used to trim the bacon and a thought occurred to him. “Mind if I borrow this?”
“Have at it.” The manager shrugged as he filled the pan with bacon and a knob of butter.
Just as the air began to fill with the meaty, salty notes of cooking bacon, the door to the kitchen swung open. “That woman is bloody certifiable,” Lescott proclaimed as he walked into the room. “I won’t spend another fucking minute out…” Lescott’s protests ceased when he took stock of the situation in front of him.
Harris, surprised by the intrusion, looked up quite aghast. Lescott had walked in as he was in the middle of ridding McCoppin of his pesky fingerprints.
“What are you doing?” Lescott asked as he took stock of the situation. The sound and smell of bacon cooking in its own fat. The heat produced by culinary endeavour. The resulting sweat upon the brow of the club’s manager. The bloodied knife in Harris’ hand. The dead body on the bench top with specks of blood on the outside of its mouth, the two fingers missing on the hand nearest to him and the old tin of pineapple next to the body. He saw it all.
Harris turned slowly to face Lescott. “I asked you to wait outside.”
The pair had come to something of an impasse in their relationship. A speed bump they ought to have seen coming from the outset. Harris studied Lescott as he tried to ascertain the damage that had been done. Lescott’s face was blank, but he was clearly assessing what he could and couldn’t turn a blind eye to. “I thought there was a rape?”
“There was. Albeit attempted rather than successful. The girl’s one of Ronnie Prince’s girls. The guy, well you just met him.”
Lescott looked down at the dismembered hand on the benchtop, “I think we’ll skip the custom of shaking hands, eh?”
“Probably for the best.” Harris nodded.
“So, we’re here to get rid of the body?”
Harris nodded slowly.
“What are you doing with his hand?” Lescott asked.
“Fingerprints. Some people take the entire finger. I find, with the right knife, if you take them at the third knuckle they pop right off.”
Silence. Dreaded, uncomfortable silence. Lescott spent a moment deliberating whether he could overlook the situation. He balanced the severity of the situation he had walked in upon against what Harris offered him as a partner. I’ve said it once, I’ll say it again. That this was Lescott’s best option was a damn sad indictment of the New South Wales Police Force, and Lescott’s standing within it.
“Food’s ready.” The club’s manager stood there holding two plates of fried breakfast.
Ramsey had taken over in the kitchen. She’d walked in with a black briefcase containing the secrets of her trade, she’d walk out an hour later and the kitchen would be pristine.
Having rolled the recently departed Walter McCoppin into a Persian rug and put him in the boot of Lescott’s car, the two men finally sat down to enjoy their breakfast. Generally, a cooked breakfast is accompanied by a mug of tea or coffee, that day it was enjoyed with cold, crisp glasses of beer.
What I’d have given for a bit of bacon and beer. My loose connection to the disgraced standover man James Harris had caused me to leave town for a while. As they drove west to Adelaide. I drove south to Melbourne, it being my intention to run some Chinese heroin down to some of my contacts down there. Turns out, there had been a miscommunication with the police about the bribe they were due, in that I refused to pay it. As soon as I pulled up on Flinders Street, I was clobbered by the boys in blue. So as my two favourite customers enjoyed their breakfast in South Australia, I was barely tolerating gruel in Pentridge Prison. Worse than the breakfast was my bunkmate, a country sort who had been nicked on a cruelty to animals charge somewhere outside Bendigo. He murmured in his sleep. I thought he must have been in one of those new-fangled, three-way relationships. He used to moan out for Daisy and Rex. Later I’d learn he was caught in the act of bestiality with farm animals. That’s country people for you. Anyway, I digress…
“What are we doing with him?” Lescott asked through a mouthful of fried bread.
“Who?” Harris asked as he looked anywhere but at Lescott.
“Who do you think? The guy who couldn’t keep his prick in his pants. The guy who’s now lying in a rug in the boot of my car.”
“We’re doing nothing with him. I’m going to go for a drive, and I’ll be back in a couple of hours. I don’t want to get you involved in it.”
Lescott clicked his tongue in his mouth. “I think it’s a bit late for that.”
“The less you know the better.” Harris shrugged.
“A partnership is based on trust and balance. You can’t trust me while I know this about you. This can’t be a balanced relationship, while I have this information on you. But if I’m complicit in it as an accessory, we can benefit from what they call mutually assured destruction.” Lescott, who had finished eating, spoke as he walked behind the bar to pour more beers. He was only a little fella, but he really could put it away.
“Partnership? When did we become partners?” Harris asked, as he scraped fried bread around his plate to wipe up the last of the egg yolk and bacon grease.
Setting two beers on the table, Lescott smiled. “When I walked into that kitchen and turned a blind eye to you performing unlicensed dentistry on a dead rapist.”
Never has an utterance been more difficult to argue with.
Chapter 29
If there was one small silver lining to the thick black storm cloud of my time in Pentridge Prison, then it was the view of the courtyard that lay in the interior of the prison. It might not sound like much, and it wasn’t, but many of my peers would have quite literally killed to get that kind of vista.
I remember it well. In fact, I couldn’t forget it if I tried. It was where I saw the most disturbing thing I have ever witnessed. You don’t live a life suckling on the teats of the underbelly without experiencing humanity’s darkest side. Of all the ungodly proclivities I profited from, none compared to what I saw that day. I’ve seen a great many things in my time. But it was from that window, overlooking that courtyard, that I watched one of the last hangings to be held in Victoria.
A madman in the Pentridge Prison cafeteria would, that night, suggest that the strange bout of anomalous weather was actually the coming together of a host of heathen gods. The likes of Zeus, Jupiter, Thor and Horus, he believed, were foretelling a gathering storm. Those “who had” were to be overthrown by those who “who had not”. For too long, the poor and the downtrodden had been left behind by those who ran the country. No longer, he said. Personally, I thought he was full of shit.
I had little concept of time in my cell. What lay between sunrise and sunset was distinguishable only by mealtimes. Somewhere between my second and third serving of slop that day, I sat at the window of my cell and watched a crowd gather. With a belly not half full of old oats and rusty water, I told myself I could remain strong. They wouldn’t let me rot in here. They knew I’d paid them before, and they knew I would pay them again. I’d hold out for a couple of days and they’d let me out with an outstretched hand.
My dreary self-obsession broke when I realised what it was that they were doing down there in that courtyard under the gloomy sky. They set out rows of neat white chairs with military precision. These weren’t chairs they allowed the likes of the inmates to sit upon. They were doing this for the ruling class. It looked like one of those weddings you see popping up in parks and gardens from time to time. The sea of chairs facing a structure that had been built for one reason and one reason alone. To hold a large, sturdy wooden beam. A joist capable of holding 200 pounds of dead flesh and bones. It was then that I understood what I was looking at.
THE DEVIL IN THE RED DIRT: DIVIDED IN LIFE. UNIFIED IN MURDER Page 25